People and Place
Part One : People Aware
Reviewing further exercises : B
Projects : A portrait sequence; focal length and pose and stance
I asked my youngest Matt if he would be my subject for the Assignment as he is the only one of my three children who is quite happy to be photographed. He has also recently taken a keener interest in photography himself which he is sharing with one of his twin sons, Lewis.
I will be discussing choice of focal length, pose and stance in more detail in my write-up on the Assignment so, in this post, I’ll concentrate mainly on the process of review. Overall, I took 327 photographs. I took 83 photographs on 16th April when I stayed overnight with Matt and his wife on the way back from Wirksworth. We went to the stables on the following morning so I could meet his latest horse. Matt came for a weekend stay the following week, bringing Lewis who was spending the weekend with him. We went on the local Common on both days as I wanted to take some photographs there and also introduce both of them to geocaching. I also took photographs in the house, including several where I used my Holga lens on canon 500D. That weekend’s total was 244. If it’s said that a total of 327 is too many then I will probably agree. I think this was due to several factors:
– Once I get started taking photographs I get so engrossed that I want to keep taking them.
– There were varying exposure problems on the different days and I wanted to do my best to meet the challenges.
– I was concerned that I only had a certain amount of time so wanted to make the most of it.
– I should also add that Matt got hold of my camera and took some photos of myself and Lewis whilst we were looking up clues etc on my computer (it was a Harry Potter based geocache). He’s therefore partly to blame as well!
– The more photographs I took the more confident I felt about asking Matt to adopt various postures.
Reviewing a portrait sequence
Firstly, I quickly eye-scan all the images once they’re in either Photoshop or Lightroom. Then I’ll label likely ones with one star, choose them for another folder and so on. I chose an initial 34 from the 327 total and printed them off in contact sheets.
Having looked at the contact sheets I then went back into Photoshop, starred 16 of them and, again, created a contact sheet so I could make my final choice of 7.
1st June 2012
People & Place 